How To Bunny Hop Late Autumn.

It makes sense to adjust the seatpost down a little if you're riding through leaves lots.

October and November are famously the cruellest months. For cyclists. Well, two of the cruellest. When the light catches them in a certain way, that is. Let's say.

So how are you supposed to retain your marbles? The emotional rollercoaster of lonely, dark, wet mornings, fancy dress parties, lonely, bright, bracing afternoons, self-imposed biking sabbaticals, plus the appearance of enticing seasonal fruit in the shops can prove too much for many. Fortunately, we have some suggestions.

Spin Classes. They do constitute an option. You can socialize, sort of. This is always good, but even more so when it's unrelentingly cold and rainy and dark. And you can also put down some high-intensity mileage in a toasty, wet-leaves-free environment. Perhaps understandably, yet also quite lamentably, most spinning bikes arrive on the gym floor without a Brooks attached. So bring your own, and a couple of turns with a small multi-tool later, you'll be suffering smugly while those around you merely suffer.Spinning is a good way to break in a Brooks Select.

Alright. Straight off we can agree that nobody likes getting punctures, and one of the barbs on a conker's spiky housing can easily put a hole in a tube. Said housings are pretty much everywhere in October and November. You do the math, as our transatlantic cousins have it.The bane of any cyclist who hasn't bought new tires in a while.

We have some tips for those wishing to remain pneumatic.

(a) Move somewhere for a few months where there are no trees.

(b) Move somewhere where it's not autumn.

(c) If you live somewhere where it isn't autumn, stay there.

(d) "Run" "solids".You don't need to factor puncture breaks into your commuting times near the North Pole.

Spiky, puncture-causing conker shells aside, the conkers themselves (especially if they are at rest on a wet street) can turn a short spin to the shops into the cycling equivalent of a military assault courseThere's more where this came from...

Speaking of which, Cyclocross still fails to show signs of getting less popular any time soon. There are lots of reasons for this, they need not detain us. Well alright then, if you insist... key to surviving late autumn is to continue to avoid Cyclocross, in the way you might avoid somebody you don't like, who also happens to be belligerently richer than you, and to whom you owe money.The boys from Rollapaluza prove that they aren't scared of a bit of fresh air.

Hallowe'en is soon upon us. This can be a fun time, but presents many people nowadays with a paralysing array of options in respect of their choice of fancy dress costume. The thing to remember here is that Halloween is traditionallyspoooky, so forget about superheroes, French Maids, cartoon characters and the like. If you can recycle your costume for some practical, stylish day to day purpose, then so much the better... you did click on spoooky, didn't you?

Aswell as all this, the clocks "change" some time soon. It's impossible, of course, to say for sure whether the clocks go back or forward, or by how many hours.A Swiss watch recommended by Grant Petersen of Rivendell. No further questions.

All we know is, Brooks traditionally sells larger quantities of Proofide in October and November than in any other months of the year. The reasons for this are unclear, given that the best known non-saddle-slathering uses for it obtain all year round.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many autumn cyclists buy a can of Proofide around this time simply because the can is similar in size and shape to their wristwatch. The frustration at not knowing in which way the clocks change causes many simply to put their watch into storage for a month or two until things have settled back down.

Of course, pomegranates are in season. The so-called "dark purply gold" of a pommy is close to being literally an aqua vita for competitive cyclists, containing, as it does, so many naturally occurring, race-legal EPO-like substances. But the problem with pomegranates, as we all know, is that you don't really know what you've got until you've cracked one open.

It might already be gone off, or it might be one of those pomegranates with clear juice, which has no properties whatsoever similar to those of EPO.

Which is where theiconic Brooks copper rivet comes in. While browsing your grocer's fruit section, quietly remove a 16.5 mm Brooks rivet from your pocket and surreptitiously plunge it, point first, through the skin of any pomegranate that comes to hand. If it shows a vibrant deep reddish colour upon withdrawal, you can consider taking it to the check-out. Though feel free to continue looking for even juicier ones.

Late autumn, after all, only comes once a year.They're called arils, if memory serves.